The Optical Society of America (OSA) has launched an Interactive Science Publishing (ISP) initiative. The initiative allows authors to submit a manuscript that includes large three-dimensional data and gives researchers, scientists and engineers a way to evaluate new research results more thoroughly. The first results to be published under the new system are the findings of two groups of researchers, one in the US and one in Australia. The researchers are announcing the development of new optical techniques for visualising the invisible processes at work in several human diseases.
Described in upcoming issues of Optics Express, the OSA's open-access journal, and in the Journal of the Optical Society of America A (JOSA A), one of these techniques may help clinicians diagnose and treat people with breathing disorders. The other can show three-dimensional structure and the blood flow mechanism at the earliest stages of heart development.
The research takes advantage of ISP, an initiative undertaken by OSA in partnership with the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, and with the support of the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research. This initiative allows scientists to expand upon traditional research results by providing software for interactively viewing underlying source data and to objectively compare the performance of different technologies. This data may be related to medical images, such as those taken with X-rays, MRIs, CT scans and ultrasounds, or it may be created in research involving oil and gas exploration, climatology, pollution monitoring and many other fields.
Besides being published in OSA's journals, both articles will also be deposited in PubMed Central, NIH's free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
